The US Plan to Partition Syria

During a Jan. 17 Stanford University speech, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson announced that the U.S. military will arm, train, finance, and otherwise support—for an indefinite time—a new, 30,000-strong, Kurdish and U.S.-allied Arab nation border force in northeastern Syria. This force in formation, effectively aimed at the partition of Syria, will be backed by at least 5000 U.S. troops installed in the three new and permanent U.S. military bases in Syria. Thousands more troops are stationed on U.S. aircraft carriers and other war ships off Syria’s Mediterranean coast, while thousands more operate from the major U.S. Air force base in Qatar.

Tiller son’s partition speech was a first for a top Trump or Obama administration official. But this former Exxon-Mobile chief essentially stated what U.S. policy has been since 2011 when the Syrian government’s attack on largely peaceful protesters demanding democratic rights and aid for drought-stricken farmers inadvertently provided the U.S. with a pretext for the now seven-year U.S.-orchestrated regime-change imperialist war that has cost the lives of some 500,000 Syrians and displaced nearly half the population.

In 2011 the compliant Turkish government of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, a U.S. NATO ally, opened its military bases to the U.S. to facilitate the entry into Syria of some 70,000 ISIS and associated fundamentalist terrorists from some 70 countries seeking the overthrow of the Assad government and the establishment of an Islamic caliphate. The New York Times noted this in mid-January 2018, stating, “In 2011 Mr. Erdogan then financed Syrian rebel groups and later allowed foreign recruits to the Islamic State and other jihadist militant groups to stream through Turkey into Syria.”

Assad, as with Libya’s president, Col. Muammar Gaddafi, months earlier, was widely expected to flee for his life, leaving the oil-rich Middle East region open as never before to U.S. domination and exploitation.